Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels — On the Pastoral Implications of Aquinas' Recognition That Homosexuality Is Natural

In my last posting some days ago about Adriano Oliva's Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2015), I noted that Oliva finds Thomas Aquinas teaching that sexual attraction to members of one's own sex is natural for those who are homosexual. As part of the natural order, the homosexual inclination some people have is to be treated with every bit as much respect as is reserved for the sexual attraction that the majority of people display towards members of the opposite sex.

Bishop William G. Curlin: Some Last Words (about Pastoral Image and Pastoral Substance)

I don't like beating dead horses — and could not bring myself to beat a live one, either. I do think it's important to make one final statement about Bishop Curlin and why I posted a series of pieces about my dealings with him over the years, and about his record in the Catholic abuse cover-up, at the time of his death.

"Bishops Like Curlin and Cardinal Law, What They Have Done Is Criminal": A Church That Wants to Be Pastoral Must Listen to Testimony of Abuse Survivors

In a 27 April 2002 letter to the Charlotte Observer entitled "In Eyes of Abuse Victims, Bishop Curlin Is No Hero,"* Neal Evans of Asheville, North Carolina, reports that after an initial 1995 meeting with Bishop William G. Curlin to discuss his abuse at the hands of a diocesan priest and after Curlin came to Asheville to issue a public apology to victims of clerical sexual abuse, Evans heard nothing — not a single word — from Curlin in the ensuing seven years. According to Evans, when Evans met with Curlin, Curlin made promises that he failed to keep, including a promise to form a lay advisory committee to advise him about clerical abuse of minors, a committee on which he would place Evans.

Remembering Bishop William G. Curlin of Charlotte As Eminently Pastoral (There's Still No Room in the Inn for You Queer Catholics) (2)

On 22 January and 3 February 2003, Cardinal Bernard Law was deposed in Boston by attorneys representing abuse survivors. In that deposition, the attorneys deposing Law asked him about Rev. George Berthold and how and why Belmont Abbey College ended up hiring Berthold with the approval of the bishop of Charlotte, William G. Curlin. 

Here are some highlights from that deposition:

Remembering Bishop William G. Curlin of Charlotte As Eminently Pastoral (There's Still No Room in the Inn for You Queer Catholics)

RIP Bishop William Curlin, Emeritus Bishop of Charlotte, NC: a holy man, a gifted pastor, a gentle priest and a dear friend. He was a friend of Mother Teresa's, devoted son of Our Lady of Lourdes and, most of all, a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. May he rest in peace.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) December 25, 2017

Tim Funk, the Charlotte Observer religion commentator, remembers Charlotte Catholic bishop William G. Curlin, who died on Christmas eve, as someone known as "a pastoral bishop" who followed Mother Teresa in reaching out to people considered untouchable lepers. As Funk notes, Curlin's tenure as bishop of Charlotte was, however, "not without controversy." Speaking as if the abuse crisis in the Catholic church in Charlotte is over and done with, Funk says that Charlotte never had the volume of abuse cases found in places like Boston:

The Missed Opportunities of Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium

In a statement at his Christian Catholicism site, Jerry Slevin concludes that, with his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis "missed real opportunities in his Letter, likely intentionally." Jerry writes,

Catholic Centrists Keep Dissecting the Gays: I Keep Listening and Wondering

Pastoral Response

As I read the ongoing conversations at the America and Commonweal blog sites about the recent Fordham conference discussing issues of sexual diversity in the Catholic context, I do not think I can feel more distant.  Stultifying.  Beside the point.  Words piled on words, saying little at all.  Absurd, contemptible attempts of the omnipresent right-wing Catholics who (unlike openly gay Catholics) have absolute entree in these "dialogues" to smear the Fordham event by linking it somehow, mysteriously, to Dan Savage.

The Bishops Assert Their Authority: U.S. Catholic Bishops Tell Us about Marriage

As expected (and as Colleen Kochivar-Baker has noted with insightful analysis), the Catholic bishops of the U.S. have approved the marriage pastoral drafted for this USCCB meeting, with a number of revisions.

Those revisions include the deletion of language about cohabitation outside marriage and use of artificial contraception as “intrinsically evil.” The final draft says, instead, that these violations of natural law are “objectively wrong” and “essentially opposed” to God’s plan. By contrast, the bishops want to maintain that same-sex marriage poses a “multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society,” though the same natural-law norms used to forbid contraceptive use and cohabitation before marriage also forbid homosexual acts.

I don’t really have anything new to add to what I’ve said previously about this eminently unpastoral—this eminently anti-pastoral—letter. Instead of analyzing the text anew, I’d like to offer a smorgasbord of thoughts about where the U.S. Catholic bishops are leading the American Catholic church with statements like this.

These are desultory, not organized and polished, thoughts, more a set of aperçus than careful analysis. Frankly, I’m not sure that this pastoral statement deserves more—and that’s where I’ll begin my set of reactions:

▪ A majority of American Catholics will simply ignore this pastoral letter, except insofar as it provides further ammunition to the religious and political right to bash gays, and the bishops know that this is the case and intend for the letter to be received in this way.

▪ The really pastoral response to the situation in which U.S. Catholicism finds itself due to the lack of leadership by its current bishops would be, instead, to ask why large numbers of Catholics are leaving the church and will continue to leave, and what the bishops ought to do about that reality.

▪ The choice to issue a marriage pastoral is a political choice that reflects a number of political realities.

▪▪ This choice reflects a church-political reality: the bishops are dancing to Rome’s tune, and they have no effective autonomy to look at the situation of the national church they are leading, and to respond to its pastoral needs from within the American context, independently of the tune played by Rome.

▪▪ It is extremely important to the current papal regime that all national bishops’ conferences say exactly—no more and no less—what Rome intends for them to say, and so statements like this pastoral letter are being dictated and imposed by Rome, regardless of what the bishops of a particular bishops’ conference want or think.

▪▪ There’s also a secular political reality at work here: this is the bishops’ intent to remain aligned with political groups (and wealthy donors within these groups) for whom it remains crucial to stigmatize and marginalize gay persons and to have religious support as they do so.

▪▪ I take a remark of Archbishop Kurtz of Louisville, head of the subcommittee that drafted this pastoral letter, as an indicator of the extent to which political considerations are driving this pastoral statement: Kurtz stated that the document will serve the American church well “for the next three years.”

▪▪ This suggests to me that there is an overwhelming need on the part of the bishops (acting in conformity to instructions from Rome) to address a political situation in the U.S. in which gay rights, including the right to same-sex marriage, may move forward dramatically in a short period of time, until a new election cycle calls this trend into question.

▪▪ The bishops aren’t defending marriage so much as they’re acting in concert to roll back the tide of gay rights in every way possible. This is a tactical, present-oriented political move that has nothing at all to do, in the final analysis, with reintroducing the majority of American Catholics to teaching about marriage from which they have strayed.

▪ In fact, the bishops don’t care much about the use of artificial contraceptives and about premarital cohabitation. They know full well that these are social trends that are impossible to reverse, and that they would pay a very high price if they began to preach against, attack, and organize politically against Catholics cohabiting before marriage and using contraceptives.

▪ This “pastoral” letter is an overwhelmingly political and overwhelmingly anti-gay move on the part of Rome and the U.S. bishops—a cynical move that may one day be seen by historians as a shocking abdication of pastoral responsibility on the part of the bishops.

▪ As Fr. Geoff Farrow points out on his splendid blog this week, the bishops (taking their orders here from Rome) are making a cynical “market” calculation by hinging more and more of the Catholic “brand” on homophobia. They believe that in doing so, they are playing to the cultural mindset of developing nations in which the Catholic population is growing rapidly.

▪ If gay people happen to be the price that has to be paid in this cynical transaction to consolidate the church’s hold over the populations of developing nations, then it is not, after all, such a high price, considering 1) that gay people are a small minority, and 2) that many people will actively support the violation of the human rights of a despised minority even, or perhaps particularly, by religious groups.

▪ This calculating and cynical political strategy runs the risk of bringing short-term gains at a very high price, however, for the Catholic church in the developed portions of the world.

▪ It will not reverse, but will instead increase, the tendency of more and more younger Catholics to walk away from the church.

▪ As a result, the church in the developed nations will be left with a core of hard-line, ill-educated younger believers who are incapable of communicating Catholic values to the culture at large, because 1) they have rejected key aspects of the culture, and 2) their educations do not equip them for such dialogue.

▪ And none of these actions will conceal what is really at the heart of the exodus of many Catholics from the church today: the bishops’ (and Rome’s) complicity in and responsibility for the sexual abuse crisis in the priesthood.

Critical Reflections on the Catholic Pastoral Response to Gay Persons: The Murder of Jorge Steven López

I’ve just written about what happens when Christian groups stereotype their LGBT brothers and sisters and then use those stereotypes to justify spiritual violence towards these brothers and sisters. I’ve also noted that those who employ bogus stereotypes to justify spiritual violence towards their gay brothers and sisters often make the spurious claim that they are acting out of pastoral concern for those they define and dismiss with language about the “gay lifestyle.”

When the present pope, Benedict XVI, writing as Cardinal Ratzinger, issued his infamous “Halloween Letter” entitled Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons in 1986, he professed concern that the church condemn violence towards those who are gay. Cardinal Ratzinger stated,

It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

But then Cardinal Ratzinger went on to note (this next passages follows immediately on the statements above),

But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.

When such a claim [i.e., that being gay is not a matter of “intrinsic disorder”] is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, then one should not be surprised if violence is the result.

As many theologians and psychologists noted when Ratzinger issued his 1986 pastoral letter, what the first passage offers with one hand, the second statement takes away with the other hand. The letter states clearly that if gay human beings expect to have the same rights as everyone else in civil society and if we reject the church’s attempt to define us as disordered, we might as well expect to be attacked.

The letter implicitly justifies what it condemns, then. It makes the atrocious violence that gay people have long experienced and continue to experience in many places in the world thinkable, and it attaches that violence to their coming out of the closet. The letter suggests that gay people should expect violence if we ask for the full range of human rights and contest the church’s definition of us as intrinsically disordered, when those formulating the definition of intrinsic disorder refuse to take our graced experience and our testimony about this experience into account as they define our humanity.

And how does what Pope Benedict wrote in 1986 differ, I wonder, from what Puerto Rican police officer Angel Rodriguez said recently after the body of a 19-year old openly gay young man, Jorge Steven López, was found decapitated, dismembered, and partially burnt? Rodriguez stated,

When these type of people get into this and go out into the streets like this, they know this can happen to them.

What Rodriguez states in response to López’s unthinkable murder sounds uncannily like what Cardinal Ratzinger states in his 1986 pastoral letter: when gay folks become public, when “these type of people” choose the gay lifestyle and become public, what can you expect? We deplore violence. But violence is what will happen if gay people ask to be treated like other human beings and refuse to accept the church’s definition of their “type of people.”

Sometimes the news has an eerie way of illuminating the mendacity of texts that say one thing but mean another. What happened to Jorge Steven López, and the reaction of Angel Rodriguez to this murder, appear to confirm the insights of those who began to argue as long ago as 1986 that the church’s claim to be above violence towards gay people, and to deplore that violence, is questionable at best, and dishonest at worst.

Defining people as “intrinsically disordered”—as a “type of people” who should expect violence if they expect to live free and with human dignity—is an act of spiritual violence that elicits actual physical violence towards gay and lesbian persons. The Catholic church’s “pastoral” approach to its gay and lesbian members is not a solution to the problem of the violence LGBT people encounter in many societies. It is a huge part of the problem.

Reflections on the Churches and Pastoral Outreach to Gay Persons in Light of the Ex-Gay Movement

Michael Bayly’s Wild Reed blog has a good posting yesterday on the “ex-gay” or reparative therapy movement, which has a Catholic component, Courage. This is one in a series of excellent analyses of this movement Michael has posted on his blog. I’d like to comment on this topic in light of my recent discussion at the America blog, to which I’ve been linking my postings in the last several days.

As I’ve noted, the America thread began with Fr. Jim Martin at America asking what gay Catholics are to do, given the church’s horrendous treatment of us today. I read Fr. Martin’s question as a pastoral one—an expression of pastoral concern for the many gay Catholics who indicate that the church is harming rather than helping us, and who are choosing to distance ourselves from the church as a result.

The question, What are gay Catholics to do?, and the pastoral way in which it was framed naturally invite the honest input of those of us who are gay and Catholic. The set-up invites us to tell our stories—deeply personal stories that often contain pain (and joy and celebration).

Several of us responded with such statements. Most of us who did so identified ourselves. We were, after all, telling our stories. We obviously wanted those stories to matter and to be taken into consideration, because we want our lives to matter and to be taken into consideration. This is what happens when an institution that claims to be about compassion, love, healing, and welcome invites people to share where they are coming from in any honest way.

And what was the response when several of us put ourselves out there in this way, opened our hearts in this risky way, dared to hope that our stories (and lives) might begin to count for the church today? What happened was predictable. This dynamic repeats itself over and over in dialogues that invite gay Christians to share authentically about our experiences in a setting designed to produce pastoral interaction with us and our brothers and sisters who may not hear these stories or think about what it means to be gay in many churches today.

What happened when some of us responded honestly and at a deep level to the question, What’s a gay Catholic to do?, identifying ourselves and using our own names, was that a number of our LGBT brothers and sisters who claim to have been “cured” of the “gay lifestyle” weighed into the discussion to inform the group that being gay is not about living lives of authentic love, but about living in sin.

These posters, whose identities were not fully disclosed (though one did have a full name attached to his posting, but one about which I haven’t been able to find any specific information), informed the group that there is something called the “gay lifestyle,” and that it is all about promiscuity, drugs, and loneliness that results from the refusal to accept God. They used bogus clinical terms to refer to a syndrome called SSA—“same-sex attraction,” a clinical term that has been invented by religious-right groups to try to rehabilitate the long-rejected American Psychiatric Association classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

This is where the conversation (which is really a non-conversation) finds itself today in many churches that wish to retain stigmatizing language about and understandings of the “homosexual lifestyle.” It is because such non-conversations can never go anywhere meaningful (and because fundamental dishonesty is at work in these conversations) that Episcopal Bishop Shelby Spong recently declared that he will no longer engage those who want to continue talking about homosexuality in the churches as the great problem to be solved, the big crisis to be faced by a church torn between fidelity to the scriptures and fidelity to its pastoral, healing mission.

As long as these non-conversations continue to take place while people of good will, who should know better, stand on the sidelines saying nothing, treating this as a battle between equals –the gays and their critics, both with legitimate viewpoints—nothing productive is going to happen. In fact, the conversations will only continue to demonstrate the power that those who misrepresent and stereotype gay human beings still have to define norms within the churches. The the contributions of the latter group to these conversations are clearly all about continuing to claim that right within the churches.

The right to define those who are gay as other, aberrant, less human than everyone else, uniquely sinful, worthy of being excluded, not worthy of being heard, because gays are, by nature, deceptive and, well, you know the shtick . . . .

Because the dynamic I’m describing has gone on so long and been used so effectively by the religious and political right, and because it has resulted in the breakdown of any honest, transformative conversation about these issues within many churches, I think it’s important to probe this dynamic carefully, with good analytical tools. I do not by any means intend to lambast any particular person who logged into the America thread recently to share his/her story of being converted from the sinful gay “lifestyle.”

At the same time, I want to note that, until we reach some accurate critical conclusions about what is taking place in these non-conversations, and until we stop using spurious norms about charity to all to offset such critical analysis, we won’t get to the bottom of what these interchanges between ex-gays and gay believers are all about, when churches open conversation spaces to discuss the pastoral situation of those who are gay.

I’d like to note several points here. Those who claim to have been healed of homosexuality frequently enter these pastoral dialogues armed and ready to shoot. They bring with them “literature” that supposedly “proves” that there is a sinful gay lifestyle and that all who happen to be LGBT fit the stereotype. They are there to discredit the stories of gay Christians, even when they profess to be there out of pastoral concern for their brothers and sisters who are gay.

And this is to say, those who enter these dialogues with the stated intent of sharing their own personal stories to counter the stories of those of us who are gay believers often have ties to right-wing political and religious groups, which they do not wish to disclose in these dialogic spaces. This is, in part, why those who claim to post true stories of their ex-gay experience in these dialogues often shield their identity.

They also frequently have ties to other posters in the group who are there with a primarily political motive, rather than a pastoral one. They are acting in collusion with these posters, whose intent is to keep these dialogic spaces all about their right, in the name of God and the church, to define and dismiss their gay brothers and sisters.

What should make this behavior particularly troublesome to fence-sitting Christians of the center is not just the willingness of organized anti-gay movements to lie about “the” gay “lifestyle”—about their gay brothers and sisters. As these groups lied over and over in the Maine campaign . . . . As it turns out Ms. Prejean has distorted the truth while claiming moral superiority over her gay brothers and sisters . . . .

What ought to concern fence-sitting Christians of the center, I would propose, is the obvious intent of these anti-gay political and religious groups to prevent any open, honest, pastorally oriented interchange between the churches and gay persons. People like Fr. Martin work to open dialogic spaces in which gay stories might be heard by the whole church.

Organized groups who have invested everything in declaring homosexuality as sinful, the most egregious sin in the canon, the one on whose basis the churches stand or fall, do not intend for these dialogic spaces to remain open. Not even when they enter the dialogue with fulsome assurances that what they are really all about is saving souls, expressing pity for poor, misguided gays who do not realize that our drug use, promiscuity, and loneliness are all due to our refusal to admit that we are sinners standing in the need of repentance.

Keep asking for honest, respectful dialogue that takes your experience as a gay believer into consideration, and allows you to define the meaning of that graced experience as freely as other Christians are allowed to discern the Spirit in their lives, and they'll eventually tell you to move on. Just move on. Join the Episcopalians. Don't expect any honest and respectful hearing here, though we do love you and have all the pastoral concern in the world for you! And we're all about promoting Catholic ("here comes everybody") values and letting you know you are not authentically Catholic because we really care about what being Catholic means.

Those entering conversations about the pastoral approach of the church to gay persons with a gay-bashing intent don't intend to listen respectfully to gay voices and gay experiences, because they have already predetermined that the only voice and experience that count is theirs. They enter the conversation with a total lack of respect for the human beings they claim to be led by the Spirit to save.

It is very important—it is the most crucial thing in the world—for some Christians today, that they retain the right to define their gay brothers and sisters, and to exclude them from the Christian community, even while professing pastoral concern for these sinful brothers and sisters. And that is what is going to continue to happen in dialogue spaces about the churches' pastoral response to gay persons, until Christians of the center make it their business to challenge the dishonest and uncharitable behavior of their anti-gay brothers and sisters.

Or until LGBT persons simply walk away from the churches altogether—which is the real agenda of these anti-gay groups, no matter how much they express pastoral concern for their gay brothers and sisters. And which totally undermines the claim of their churches to be about God, love, compassion, communion, catholicity, etc.

Addendum, 9:30 A.M.: a perceptive reader of this blog has helped me, in an email exchange, too recognize that I need to clarify what I mean when I keep talking about the fence-sitting and silence of centrist Catholics. As this reader notes, many good Catholics are involved in activities to counter the homophobia in the church, and it's impossible to know about all of these, since people don't always choose to act by writing letters or blog postings, but in other ways.

And that's a significant point. I don't by any means want to overlook all of this activity. I know it's going on, and that, for example, quite a few Catholics in Maine worked long and hard during that recent battle to offset the church's homophobia.

My critique is really focused on what I sometimes call the intellectual elite of American Catholicism, on some leading moderately liberal American Catholic bloggers and journalists who remain utterly silent in the face of the church's savagery towards its gay members, or worse, who defend the church's treatment of LGBT persons. These folks have voices that count, and could have an influence, if they chose to speak out. They and the sector of the American Catholic church they represent—well-educated, well-represented in professional circles in important cultural and demographic centers in the U.S.—also do not, in my experience, have significant problems with the use of artificial contraception. Yet even though the same moral norm used to forbid that practice is the norm used to bash gay Catholics, they remain silent about the gay-bashing, and about the disparity between how the church treats its gay members and its straight members using contraception.

On Consulting the Wisdom of the Faithful: Towards a Truly Pastoral Church

Today is the funeral of Steve’s father.

Yesterday, at the wake, the priest (who for several years gave Marriage Encounter workshops with Steve’s parents) said, “John reminded me of St. Francis’s famous saying about preaching: ‘Preach always. If necessary, use words’.”

That statement really does sum up Steve’s father John’s life as a follower of Jesus. He preached always. He seldom used words to do so.

He was a giant of a man, intimidating because of his height and large frame. A cousin of Steve’s told me yesterday she had always been a bit afraid of her uncle John, when she came to babysit the children of the family. He was so large, he filled the kitchen up, she said.

Years later, when she told him about how intimidated she was by his height, he laughed. In the almost forty years I knew him, I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. He provided leadership in his family and community quietly, far more by doing than by saying.

Like many German Catholic farm families in the upper Midwest, this was a family that hewed strictly to the church’s principle of being fruitful and multiplying. In previous generations, the farms needed the labor of many hands. Having 10 or more children made economic sense, in the world of pre-high tech agriculture. And when some children weren’t suited for farm work or perhaps for marriage, religious life and the priesthood provided a tried and true option.

Now, things are radically different. The world in which the large farm families made perfect sense is gone. With the mechanization of farms, fewer hands are needed to farm even larger tracts of land.

The shift in how land is farmed, and in the cultural context supporting the family farm, makes for a massive transition in how families live their lives. Now, when religious life and the priesthood are not attractive options for those who have a different optic or calling, more and more children drift away—to the cities, to ways of living far different from the single option their upbringing pointed them to.

When families breed prolifically for generations, they are, of course, also likely to have a certain percentage of gay or lesbian children. One of the interesting and often unacknowledged consequences of the Catholic procreative ethic is that it naturally results in the birth of children who are gay or lesbian.

In the past, these children often became “bachelor farmers,” if they were male, sometimes living together with other “bachelor farmers” in living arrangements that must have been obvious to their communities, but were never pried into. When they didn’t choose this option, they often joined religious communities or the priesthood.

Today, they are frequently more open about their identity—because they have the option to recognize this identity and claim it, to live it more or less openly. Those who go to the cities can live in public gay relationships, without fear of censure or reprisal. Increasingly, those who choose to stay in their communities of origin, perhaps farming the family farm, as a brother of Steve’s has chosen to do, simply live quietly and courageously as openly gay members of their communities, sometimes in public committed relationships.

For the obituary and funeral program, Steve’s family chose to print the names of the partners of the sons who are gay. Doing this represents a significant social shift in the way middle America handles the fact that gay sons and daughters, gay brothers and sisters, are to be found in every family.

Steve’s father was part of that shift, in his own quiet, solid way. He might well have chosen to rail against the two sons who “chose” to be gay. He might have excluded them. Some members of his family who believe their Catholicism is the correct and pure form of a Catholicism that has become attenuated in the practice of others actively promoted the exclusion option.

Steve’s father chose not to listen to the advice of those family members. He didn’t argue. He refused to fight. He simply acted what he believed: he included; he welcomed; he accepted; he affirmed. He loved.

On the next-to-last visit we made to Steve’s parents, in November 2007, we wanted to surprise the parents. We let some of Steve’s siblings know we were coming to visit, but didn’t tell his mother and father.

This was a time in which our lives had been made exceptionally hard by a boss who happens to have a gay son herself, but who used homophobia to make our lives miserable. Steve's parents had met this boss on a trip to us, and were aware of her prejudice. They suffered along with us, as we went once again through the fires of homophobic discrimination in a church-affiliated college. As they suffered, they asked again and again how someone with a gay child herself could find it in her heart to make the lives of gay children of other parents so difficult.

When we arrived at the farm, Steve’s father was sitting alone in the kitchen. Steve called from the farmyard to ask how things were with his father. As they talked on the phone, Steve walked into the kitchen.

His father was dumbfounded. He was also overjoyed to see us. He gave me a bear hug I can still feel in my bones. A hug similar to the one God gives children returning home—the embrace the father gives to the wandering son in the parable of the prodigal son.

A church that listened well to the wisdom of its faithful—a wisdom derived from their struggle to live the Christian life well in diverse cultural circumstances—would be far more like the church of Steve’s father John, and—I cannot avoid saying this, though it hurts to say it—far less like the church of the Holy Father Benedict XVI.

What I wrote on this blog yesterday points (to my way of thinking) to one inescapable conclusion: in the papacies of John Paul II and of Benedict XVI, the church has failed at a fundamental level to be church. The ecclesiology of the church of the tiny remnant of pure and true believers is tragically flawed; it is not adequately catholic.

It is not adequately catholic because it deliberately does not want to welcome and include all. It is a church that lacks the pastoral compassion and outreach Jesus himself lived (Preach always—when necessary, use words) throughout his ministry.

A church that holds the door fast against selected groups of sinners; a church that cannot embrace sinners with the warm clasp of welcome; a church whose leaders refuse even to sit down with and face those who have been wounded by its pastors: this is a church that fails to be catholic. And it fails at the most fundamental level possible—the level of practice (Preach always—when necessary, use words).

A church that partook of the wisdom of people like Steve’s father John would be a very different church from the one our current pope has spent so much energy building in the past several decades. And it would be a better church, one more unambiguously shaped by the core values of the gospel and the lived example of Jesus. In being a better church, it would also be a more effective church, a clearer sign of God’s salvific presence in the world, calling all of creation to the divine embrace.

I am profoundly grateful for having known Steve’s father John, and for all his practice of Christian faith has meant in my life and the life of someone I love deeply, his son Steve. May John rest in peace.

The Churches and Gay Folks: Ignorance or Malice?

A church ally we in the LGBT community who still search for spiritual foundations should celebrate is Peter J. Gomes. I saw him recently in the documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So," and was taken with his calm wisdom and pastoral leadership. In a presidential campaign in which questions of gender and race loom large, and in which there have been important discussions of the sometime inability of both the women's movement and the African-American community to form solidarity with the gay community, Gomes's voice is important.

The following are excerpts from his new book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007):

"The contemporary fear gripping America appears to be a fear of the normalization of homosexuality. What a strange pathology this is--fear that the sexual identity and practices of a minority will somehow taint the identity and practices of the majority....Gay marriage is seen to threaten heterosexual marriage to such an extent that constitutional amendments must be designed to prevent it, although no one seems prepared to propose similar legislation to prohibit divorce, which is a far greater threat to marriage and the family, and on which subject Jesus himself had distinct views. On homosexuality, he had nothing to say. This irrational fear of the sexual other is all the more dangerous because it conceals itself within the sanctions of religion. Homophobia is the most current example of how good people can end up doing and beliving bad things" (106; emphasis added).

"If there remains one area in which our parochial obduracy continues to obtain, however, it is in the church's treatment of its homosexual brothers and sisters; if there is an area in which we are to be weighed and found wanting, this is it. It is not out of ignorance alone that we behave as we do toward sexual minorities; it is out of ignorance, fear, and in certain cases, malice. None of it is excusable: private judgment on sexual matters does not excuse our unwillingness to include in full participation in the household of faith those who engage in sex differently. Two generations of biblical scholarship have shown that the scriptures cannot be used as a basis for our discrimination on the subject of homosexuality, so why are our churches as divided on this subject today as they were a generation ago on the subject of women, or a century ago on the subject of slavery?...

Thuis I have been disappointed, to say the least, to find that the Bible becomes the first refuge of those who are unwilling to reconsider their extrabiblical prejudices against including homosexuals in the full life and ministry of the church. I had hoped that, as has happened with women and racial minorities, our predominantly Christian culture would recognize that God's children, the homosexuals in our midst, cry out for our compassion and acceptance. In this decade, alas, exactly the opposite has happened. Positions have hardened and homosexuals have been demonized, condemned to a 'lifestyle' rather than invited to a life in the household of faith. It amazes me that any thoughtful homosexuals would continue to want any part of a community, religious or otherwise, that in the name of God has behaved toward them with such contempt. ...

People outside the Christian community wonder what all the fuss is about, many within the Christian community are discouraged by militant homophobia, and too many in the Christian community see homosexuality as the only available proxy to be fought in the pervasive culture wars. With so much going wrong in the world, one might think that we would have more important things with which to concern ourselves" (200-201; emphasis added).

"I once preached a sermon on why God should love us if we did not love what God loves, in which Iargued that by the example of Jesus and the words of the prophets, God loves the marginalized, the outcast, and the questionable in society--the very people whom we, as a rule, keep out of our churches and out of positions of leadership. It is fashionable to help the poor but not to empower them, and until recently, for many Christians it was acceptable to confine the spiritual gifts of women to a lessor order of magnitude within the church. Today it remains acceptable among far too many Christians to regard homosexuals as beyond the pale of the church unless, while remaining homosexual, they cease to behave as such. For certain Anglican prelates, including the archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, to argue that they are defending the faith by excluding the homosexual faithful on biblical grounds represents a degree of hubris, ignorance, and noncharity that baffles the mind" (242).

Do Gays Leave the Church? Or Vice Versa?

Again, this posting is part of an ongoing dialogue on a thread at National Catholic Reporter's blog site, the NCR Cafe. The thread deals with the Catholic church's approach to LGBT persons, and is entitled "The Intrinsic Disorder Revisited (Again)." For anyone reading these postings from the NCR cafe on the Bilgrimage blog, it might be helpful to look at the NCR site to see the context of my remarks: http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337. If nothing else, Bilgrimage will document, for anyone interested, the attempt of one member of the gay community as the 21st century begins to open a dialogic space in the churches for honest, redemptive discussion of the impact of church teaching on the real lives of gay folks. Here's my NCR posting:

"Marie, you've addressed Dennis, and I don't want to interrupt. But your post also addresses issues I've raised and names me, so I hope my response won't be intrusive.

I think I glimpse your point--well, perhaps. If I'm missing your point, please tell me. If it's a question of calling on GLBT believers to interact with the church and expect good shepherding, it's a point well-taken.

Still, there are some sound reasons, I believe, that a large number of gay (I will use the term inclusively here) Christians shun the churches. It's because we feel shunned ourselves. Shunning makes it psychologically difficult, if not impossible, to interact with the institution doing the shunning.

The experience of gay Christians in the U.S. varies, of course, depending on one's geographical locale. In large urban areas, especially on the two coasts, many gay Catholics can find a variety of liturgical experiences, parishes, and ministries that allow one to be unapologetically gay and continue to have some connection to the church. That is, if one wants this, when the institution itself teaches at its highest level that one's very nature is intrinsically disordered....

The situation in the heartland (where I live) is, of course, different. There, especially in rural parishes, many Catholics can imagine they have never even met or interacted with a gay person. This imagination reflects the reality of many gay lives in the heartland: many of us cannot safely disclose our identity, and church is one of the least safe places to do so.

I could say a lot more about this, but I might wander from my main point if I do so. To try to say what I would like to say as briefly as possible, I'll tell a quick story. I know a good Catholic family living in the Midwest, in which ten siblings of a family of twelve married, producing 72 children. This is a family without strong anti-gay bias in the older generation. Talk to the ten older folks with the 72 children, and they'll say that they don't believe they ever met gay folks growing up. If they do so today, they do not feel inclined to judge them. Their Catholic faith teaches them not to be inhospitable, and it teaches them that judgment belongs only to the Lord.

I know this family well, and I know that of the 72 members of the next generation, a certain percentage are gay. Several of these are out of the closet and at peace with their identity--though, in each case, the decision to come out has placed them at odds with the church. There is also, in their generation, increasing polarization over the issue of gay folks, and some of their siblings and cousins have chosen fundamentalisms, both Catholic and otherwise, which target the gay siblings/cousins.

Point of parable: I suspect that even in the good Catholic parishes and families of the heartland, there has always been an abundance of gay folks. In previous generations, many of these may have gone into religious life or the priesthood, perhaps without having any notion of their orientation. The tenor of Catholic life was not disrupted in any way by the open presence of gay folks, and many Catholics in this region can still, today, assume they do not know any gay folks.

You ask, 'How can we fault the Church for not meeting the spiritual needs of homosexuals when homosexuals do not present themselves at the churches at all or if they come expecting confrontation?' In the kind of parishes I'm describing, here's what often happens when we try your strategy.

First, we find that if we expect to be visible, we create controversy. For many of us, that alone is a psychological barrier. I'd like very much to go to church and simply pray and participate--period. But with a partner whom I love and will not deny, with whom I share a relationship that God has richly blessed, a graced relationship I'd like to celebrate.

I do not want to go to church and be a gay poster statement. I do not want to make a scene. I simply want to worship along with the liturgical community, feel a part of the family of Christ, pray and bring the resources of liturgical involvement into my daily life. But I want to remain myself as I worship, since who else can worship for me? Certainly not the pretend-straight persona the church asks me to don as a costume when I walk through the church door?

For that matter, I would much prefer being included in a 'regular' parish as opposed to an exclusively gay one. To me, though I understand why some folks go that direction, there's a ghettoization about being within a gay worshiping community. I cherish the reminder of 'ordinary' parish life that we're all in it together: old, young, sick, well, rich, poor, black, white, male, female, gay, straight.

The initial barrier for many gay Catholics who seek a liturgical community, then, is the question of disclosure/concealment. For gay Catholics who are honest about their identity in their daily lives, concealment in the parish is not an option. For those who are still hidden, being hidden in church life can add to the toxic shame one can already feel deeply, as a closeted person. Going to church can rub salt in wounds that are already raw....

For those who are out, there can be a gamut of experiences in church life. I recently read a blog account of a gay couple who went to the childhood parish of one of the partners in Pennsylvania this past Christmas. There, they endured a sermon in which the pastor fomented against gay rights and gay unions, and the leaflet displays at the back of the church were full of rabidly anti-gay literature. Under such circumstances, church can be a direct assault on the core of one's humanity.

I have heard of parishes in the heartland in which some homophobic parishioners have succeeded in having the pastor deny communion to openly gay couples. On Pentecost Sunday, gay or gay-affirming Catholics in some heartland parishes have had fellow Catholics threaten them if they approached the communion rail, or try to prevent them from going to communion wearing rainbow sashes. The media have reported on this.

I go to church only sporadically now. My own experience has included going to church some Sundays to hear rocking and rolling anti-gay homilies, including one not too many months back that pinned the blame for the abuse crisis in the church on gays. I have heard reports from friends and relatives of similar homilies in parishes in my area; some of these folks, who are not gay, have walked out in disgust when those homilies are preached, because they have gay family members and friends whom they cherish and will not see abused.

I'm not sure if this is a turn-the-other-cheek situation, frankly. Of course, one can and must forgive such malice. One can and must turn the other cheek. But what we're talking about is not simply a kind of ignorant doltishness that unintentionally runs roughshod over the feelings and rights of others. As Peter Gomes's recent book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus notes, we're talking about actual, intentional malice. This abuse of Christian faith and values needs not merely to be forgiven. It needs to be resisted, critiqued, weeded from church life.

I don't think one is compelled to submit oneself on a routine basis to malicious treatment aimed at demolishing one's very sense of self worth. Few folks have the psychological stamina to stand up to such treatment week after week, day after day--especially when it's coming from an institution that claims to represent a God of love and welcome for all.

Finally, there's the question of a kind of uncritiqued heterosexism that is simply the air we breathe, in Catholic parishes. In my experiences of going to liturgy in recent years, I never hear family described, prayed about, spoken of, in any way that does not implicitly assume all families consist of a husband and wife, married for life, with each assuming his/her proper role. This in the face of the sociological reality that not only do parishes include gay parishioners, but they also include divorced parishioners who may or may not be remarried, single folks who may never wish to marry, blended families, and so on.

We still talk about family as if we live in the 1950s. And this is very oppressive for many of us, gay and straight alike.

(As an aside, not sure what you're getting at with the Leviticus holiness code quotation above, unless you mean to say that the Christian experience abrogates the law?)"